Here are my slides and notes for the lightning talk I did at WordCamp Johannesburg 2018
Please find the slides below:
My Speaker Notes Below: (Might not always make a lot of sense but added for extra reference)
If you’ve been building websites for clients for a while, you’ve probably reached a point where you have turned away clients who can’t afford you. It’s actually a great position to be in. It means you’ve come to the realization what your time is worth and you’re not willing to sacrifice that worth for clients with low budgets.
But if you’re like me it just doesn’t feel right showing these clients away. Especially at a time when almost all your enquiries are low budget clients. So that’s what lead me to Exploring new ways of engaging with website clients
- Website in a Week/Day etc
- Turnkey Systems or WaaS
- DIY Training
The first thing we’re looking at is Website in a Week or day or 3 days or any fixed amount where you dedicate that specific time to one client.
In my case I do a Website in a Week and I’ve created a whole experience around it, where it’s all about taking your service delivery from “uninspired” to “unforgettable.”
but there are a lot of different ways to do this…
The idea behind this concept to build a website in a short focused time. Depending on the time you could only work with 1 client at a time or at least have the ilusion of working with them exclusively.
The most important part of these style of service delivery is that all preparation needs to be done in advance, Logos, Branding, Photos and all content need to be created before the week can start.
Another very important thing is that both the tech stack and the delivery process needs to be productised and standardise. In my case we use a base site that has a starter theme, all the go to plugins and of course Beaver Builder installed so I just make a clone or use something like All In One Migration and easily set it up.
I also have the process set up in Asana and it’s got specific tasks that needs to be done every day to get the site done in a week. So I’ll use a template of this for each project, and invite the client in on it.
Advantages of this way:
- Get booked out weeks or months ahead: Clients needs to pay a deposit and then get’s booked in to the calendar..
- Get all content you need before you even start – they then need to get all the content ready. So in our case we will have a discovery workshop beforehand and will then decide if clients need new logos, branding elements a photoshoot or help from a copywriter. All of this then get’s done before their booked in date.
- Quicker to develop – When you can create something quicker it means higher productivity, profit and a greater experience for the client
- Collaborative process -Clients feel their input is taken without them leading the process
- Client knows what to expect – Open communication keeps them I invite client to the the Asana Project and assign feedback tasks to them
- Get paid on time – Specific milestones for payment and also the set time that this happen means there’s no confusion about when payments are due. Client’s book in and then the balance just before the site goes live – which should be the Friday.
- Because clients know that the day or the week was their dedicated time they don’t keep coming back with revisions and request afterwards.
Website as a Service or the Turnkey systems are a great business niche for part-time or full-time web consultants who are looking for a way to serve their lower budget clients, earn recurring revenue, and scale their business to server hundreds of customers without the growing pains of hiring a huge staff.
So What is Website as a Service
It’s the Software as a Service model but based on website delivery where you use WordPress multisite to delvier a Turnkey website that’s fully automated
The single most important thing you do in order to build a turnkey website solution is to choose an industry niche.
A common misconception is that by narrowing your focus to a very specific industry or client type, you’re going to lose out on customers who don’t fit in that niche, but with turnkey websites if you don’t you’ll compete with Wix and SQ. You will also make it virtually impossible to have a standard web or technology stack and for Turnkey systems on WordPress multisite that is a must have.
- Hosting that can handle automated WildCard subdomains for example Cloudways or WPEnging
- WordPress Multisite
- You need something that can handle and automate Domain mapping for you
- Either you host, or plugins that’s multisite compatable, lightweight and can be whitelabled or have un-intrusive branding
- Theme that’s easily customisable some of the favourites are the Genensis Framework, Beaver Theme, GeneratePress
- Dashboard customisation – clean as possible with guidance
- User facing plugins would be to your niche and must be multiste compatable and again able to whitelabel or not havve a lot of in your face branding
- Finally something that will handle the membership creation subscription as well as automated site creation for you – WPUltimo
DIY and Training
You can do a diy style training in a few different ways for example
- 1:1 During a website build process,
- Online Live training,
- In Person Workshops,
- Course with live training added
You can help them with Setup and provide Video Courses, All of these you can either do with your Turnkey system as the backbone or as one off sites, You can also charge for it on a Monthly basis or Once Off.
